Same-sex marriage: National support soars

Support for same-sex marriage is up sharply in a dramatic public opinion shift from as recently as three years ago, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Monday morning.

Kara Haney, left, and her partner of 8 years Kate Wertin, right, embrace in the Lobby Bar in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood as the Washington State Senate passes a bill that would legalize gay marriage in Washington.

The national poll showed 49 percent of Americans favoring marriage equality with 40 percent opposed. Support among younger voters approaches 60 percent. Only two groups among those surveyed — voters over 65 and Tea Party supporters — werein opposition.

The figures are an almost precise flip on the issue from an NBC/Journal poll in October of 2009. At that time, 41 percent favored same-sex marriage while 49 percent were opposed.

In 2004, Republicans used more than 20 statewide ballot measures, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, to get evangelical voters to turn out at the polls for President Bush’s reelection.

Same-sex marriage was opposed by a 30-62 percent margin in an NBC/Journal survey taken at the time.

“Progress is happening: The Republican Party, in what its presidential candidates are saying, is out of step with the mainstream,” said State Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, sponsor of Washington’s marriage equality legislation.

The shift registered in the NBC/Journal poll has been reflected here in findings by the Washington Poll. The survey has shown steadily rising support, first for domestic partnership rights and, in a poll released last October, same-sex marriage.

Washington and Maryland recently became the seventh and eighth states to legalize same-sex marriage, in each case with a vote by the legislature. A pair of pro-equality Catholic governors, Christine Gregoire in Washington and Martin O’Malley in Maryland, championed the legislation.

Three states are likely to vote on marriage equality this November.

Opponents in Washington and Maryland are vowing to collect enough signatures to force a referendum in November.

In Maine, where a Republican governor opposes marriage equality, supporters of same-sex marriage have submitted more than enough signatures to put the issue on the November ballot.

The Washington Poll last fall found that 55 percent of Evergreen State voters would give thumbs-up to marriage equality were it enacted by the Legislature and then put to a public vote.

Same-sex marriage is currently legal in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia.